Film

Created April 2023

This project was made possible through the production and technical support of the Movement Lab in the Milstien Center of Barnard College.

Screened with live performance and installation as part of Performance Arts Course at the Undergraduate Arts Showcase in May 2023.

Disco Ball Funeral. Audio memories of Disco Ball, montaged with video footage of funeral speeches and respective interpretive dance. The process of uncovering the truth of Disco Ball’s death is emotionally chaotic, like any good funeral. Further, since his burial was improper, the piece serves as the synchreses of many different representations and memorials of him – in physical sculpture, video, sound, and dance. These themes originally arose from Disco Ball’s reflective and refractive nature, creative and connective reciprocity – he is more than the sum of his audience of friends, through time-transcendent glimmers.

Created April 2023

This project was made possible through the production and technical support of the Movement Lab in the Milstein Center of Barnard College

This video, “Catch Up” is an exploration of synchresis, the juxtaposition of multimedia elements, to call upon soundscape, voice, body, and memory in an audio ethnography – mixing hazy dance with an audio montage of Paris, France, voice journals, and more.

The essay below brings this work into conversation with ideas outlined in the book Sound on Screen by Michel Chion, a French composer, film theorist, and scholar renowned for his pioneering work on the relationship between sound and image in cinema.

Chion’s ‘image of language’ and the meaning of language as places where the brain first goes point towards a great chasm between the effable and ineffable, as shaped by our perception of it. The relationships between dancing, music, technology, improvisation, and ethnography are of particular interest – how the spatial, temporal, and emotional relationships between these happenings change the nature of the art. It is a synchresis happening on and offscreen, and between those worlds in the temporal and spatial reimaginations that filming/documenting/sharing improvisational, immersive art evokes.

Dance is so ephemeral, and the kinesthetic empathy that intertwines performers and audiences is so bodily, yet the image of dance involves a translation of that content into form, in a similar way to language. I think dance has powerful potential as a language that is more fit for understanding ourselves and existence– the body can make spatial and visual occupations that are more fully engaging linguistic networks to live within, a physicality that can still fill chambers. Further, ‘the body’ itself is both a gigantic eye, ear, and instrument, amongst other things, which gives it a uniqueness that addresses the aforementioned chasm. These things come to mind as I think in conversation with Chion’s ideas of the ‘eye as more spatial, and ear as more temporal.’ The idea of visual microrhythms, and the (irr)reversibility of image and sound, compels me towards the intersections of technology and magic. 

 Perhaps it is compelling that synchresis, between all sorts of modes of being (what happens when we “rediscover” gustatorial, proprioceptive, vestibular, etc. senses in connective ways?). Here I am compelled towards the intersection of technology and magic, in understanding the infinite immersions, both nurtured and innate, that are synchresistic. What underlying truths can be revealed from synchresis? Which combos are slightly off-putting, seemingly forged from nothingness/randomness, or perhaps feel even more innate (and satisfying?) than the original sound-image relationship itself? This idea is reminiscent of, and a metaphor for, the multiplicities of realities interwoven with perception itself.

It may be especially uncanny to deconstruct and separate artistic outcomes of these mediums after their creation (technology can also supplant the original divide between mediums, instead of bringing them together supplementally). As Chion discusses regarding horror films – sometimes when sound and image give different information, the composite (reciprocity of added value) feeds a newness back onto itself. In terms of silence – when one records oneself dancing to music, it is most helpful to watch back the video silently, so that the flow of the music doesn’t supplant itself onto the image of dance. Likewise, I think of postmodern silent dances/dance films– so that sound doesn’t alter movement or perception. 

Thus, to emulate the organic workings of perception, technology, as explored in this video, can stimulate our senses with synchresis of kinesthetic empathy, memory, and linguistic form with moving images, sounds, and environments.

Chion, Michel. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. Translated by Claudia Gorbman, Columbia University Press, 1994.

Upward Spiral is an experimental Screendance documentary that navigates the subjective embodiment of selves, objects, and spaces, forging paths between aloneness and togetherness.

I created Upward Spiral to explore the subjectivities of embodiment that hover in the gaps between ourselves and the living world: public and private selves, the butterfly effects of pasts, presents, and futures, inner children and adults, responses to life’s traumas and joys, complex growth and simple being.

First, I worked with cast members one-on-one to create single-shot films that explored how sacred objects, spaces, and routines are embodied within their internal lives. Woven together, these individual experiences portray collective rituals and moods of identity and grounding – as represented by the ‘object-altar’ – where meaning meets material in the body.

I also collected 43 drawings, where I asked people to draw their response to the question: “How do you feel in your body right now?” During the rehearsal process, my cast and I explored how movement can influence, represent, and be inspired by ‘body drawing’ as a shared mode of articulation. We also played games and journaled to explore where the self changes between in connection, isolation, safety, and freedom – these processes culminated in a series of audio interviews in the film.

Altogether, the interconnection of many intense subjective experiences guides the audience through a fundamentally human Upward Spiral toward a more articulately embodied togetherness in this experimental film.

December 2022

Screenings:

CoLab Performing Arts Collective Fall 2022 Showcase

Pop-up: Screendance Showing

The brain can at times be a mechanical bull that we cling to with one grimy hand. Here, machines of modern convenience and hedonism come into intimate, messy contact with biological and neurotic human behavior. This film, Satisficing, explores resistance, interjection, and compulsion in everyday routines.

“Satisficing” is a combination of the words “to satisfy” and “to sacrifice” that describes the act of prioritizing realism and momentum, over the exhaustive and paralytic pursuit of perfection. A “satisficer” makes do and moves forward. It’s not laziness or settling — it’s steering and survival.

In psychology, satisficing pushes back against maximizing, trading endless analysis for quick, workable decisions. In economics, satisficing habits lean into bounded rationality, where time, energy, and information are always limited. In management, satisficers champion progress over perfection. Algorithms mirror human shortcuts to be fast, flexible, and efficient. In evolutionary biology, satisficers ensure survival by balancing resources and risk.

The nature of organisms, our connections, internal worlds, and the social and technological systems we create are dependent on the satisficer model, in many ways for better and for worse. All great truths are and/both, not either/or.

This film dives into how satisficing contributes to the neurotic underbelly of the social unconscious inhabited by the individual. Are we messy and scary, to the technology we’ve created to clean us and soothe our fears? How do satisficing and obsessive-compulsive tendencies become more than the sum of their parts for the contemporary individual?

October 2022

Screenings: Pop-up: Screendance Showing Fall ’22